


I think you'd be warmer closer to me

by veksholm



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 04:58:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14585475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veksholm/pseuds/veksholm
Summary: Calla arrives back in Nashville on Tuesday and Ekky’s already moved out of the complex.Alternately, Calla learns that her family is a lot bigger than she thinks it is.





	I think you'd be warmer closer to me

**Author's Note:**

> This is obviously a year late, but was largely written during the 2017 playoffs and came from a year of anxiety about the Vegas draft. Some hand waving and major timeline shifts occur, such as women’s leagues existing earlier and Ekholm’s Big Move taking place in the summer instead of earlier in 2016.
> 
> I am not in any way Swedish. Please do not mind my egregious cultural misses (and/or come talk and help me fix them!) and also assume that most of these conversations probably take place in the characters’ native languages where applicable.
> 
> This is a story about two best friends being very melodramatic, and a few other friends trying to fix it.
> 
> Title from Nathaniel Rateliff's _Oil and Lavender_.

_August 2016_

Calla arrives back in Nashville on Tuesday while the boys are headed to Toronto for the World Cup, so there’s no good explanation for why she hears people moving around in Matti’s condo. The explanation, it turns out, is that he has moved out.

She learns this the hard way, _of course_ , because she assumes it must be friends or family crashing there and bangs on his door yelling “stop robbing Ekky” to a small woman who stares blankly at her and says “I don’t know Italian, sorry.” Said small woman has a paint roller in her hand, the back wall Calla sees behind her is bright blue now, and the apology Calla stumbles through is probably respectable enough that her new neighbor won’t hate her.

She texts Fil first because she’s pretty sure she’d remember if Matti told her he was moving out, but she’s also pretty sure he _would_ tell them. It’s sort of a mystery all around.

She sends Mattias a text too because she’s still feeling cranky and confrontational from her encounter with the new neighbor.

_your new roommate’s a lot cuter than you._

And then, because sometimes you have to be direct, she sends a second one.

_hey here’s a fun question – where do you live?_

The little dots that mean he’s responding pop up and disappear and pop up and disappear and Calla feels a little pit form in her stomach. The thing is, Mattias is _always_ there for her and Fil. He takes care of them. Sure, if anyone asks she’ll be the first to say it’s _just_ Fil, but every Nashville fan knows how codependent all three of them are. Calla knows how lucky she is that he took them in and gave them a family in Tennessee.

Only he’s not going to be here for her now because, according to the response she finally gets from him, he moved across town.

&

_December 2011_

Calla usually naps on the way home, but it was Eliana’s first game with the team tonight and the novelty of another girl sitting beside her is enough to stay awake. She hasn’t played with any other girls since she moved up to the men’s team, and she’s more than a little glad it’s her cousin and not a stranger, because she doesn’t really know how to talk about the two games - doesn’t want to have to play politics with a girl she doesn’t know, or talk around whether or not they should be playing on the women’s team instead.

It’s not technically a permanent decision - lots of women have switched back and forth - but the styles of gameplay are so different that the North American leagues only draft out of either the mens or womens European leagues respectively. Calla made her choice probably a little more hastily than she should have, hadn’t really considered her mom’s advice too deeply when she told her to think about how she wanted to develop herself, thinking only of the NHL and how she had to get there.

And Calla doesn’t think she’s convincing anyone on the Functional Adulthood front - she spends most of her free time playing COD with Jakob and Marti, and still lives with her parents - but that hasty plan to try to get drafted by the NHL _worked_ , so that’s got to earn her some points.

Whatever, at least her room smells better than Martin’s. Right now it’s even _neat_ because her mom made her clean it last night when they found out Eliana was getting called up and the whole family was coming over for dinner to celebrate. Which, yea, when she puts it that way, she’s _definitely_ not fooling anyone on the Adulthood scale.

“Calllllla -” and, whoops, she’s zoning out in the middle of Eliana talking about going out for her birthday.

“What, Elis? I’m sitting right here, you don’t have to yell.”

“Says the girl who’s literally falling asleep in front of me.”

“You’re lucky she’s even this conscious,” Jakob says, turning around in the seat in front of them.

Mattias is beside him and cranes his head around too. “The first rule of roadtrips is don’t disturb a sleeping Calla.”

“That’s because when your faces are the first thing I see after waking up, I think I’m having a nightmare.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say _to your_ _Captain_ ,” Jakob smirks, dragging out the last bit.

“Oh my god, he’ll get over that sometime this season, I hope,” she says to Eliana conspiratorially. “What were you saying before -”

“Before you fell asleep,” Jakob repeats and she catches Mattias’ eyes as he laughs at the exchange. The dim light overhead dulls them, she thinks absently, but that’s not something she really wants to touch.

“I was telling you what the girls were gonna do for my birthday before they called me up here.”

“Okay...are you inviting me or what?”

“No, they’re -” Eliana frowns and rushes out, a little embarrassed, “They’re not gonna do it now that I’m here.”

_Oh_. Well, Calla was right that Eliana wouldn’t want to talk about it, at least she seems uncomfortable bringing it up, but it looks like they’re stuck.

It’s not that Calla doesn’t get the debate. She _knows_ that choosing to go for the NHL means she’d chosen one league over the other, but she had been so young at the time, it hadn’t felt like taking a side. She’s _still_ so young; how else is anyone supposed to make that kind of decision?

It hadn’t felt like she was deciding on a broader philosophy - whether the top women should be playing in the SEL for better competition or whether they should be growing the women’s game in the SDHL - just that she was choosing a team to play on.

It was only when her old teammates wouldn’t talk to her anymore that she’d realized what bridges she’d burned, and that maybe switching back and forth isn’t as easy as she’d always thought it was watching Erika Holst come back after her few years on the Thrashers.

“Oh,” Calla says, leaving it hanging in the air awkwardly.

The boys are still turned around and she can see on their faces that they don't catch on like she did.

“Wait, what?” Jakob says, looking back and forth between Calla and Eliana. “Your friends aren’t gonna celebrate your birthday because you moved leagues?”

Eliana shrugs a little with one shoulder and looks at Calla with a panic on her face. What she thinks Calla is gonna say is a mystery, but Silfverberg doesn't bother waiting for a response.

“That's a pretty dick move,” Jakob continues, turning to look at Mattias. He looks less surprised than Jakob and more worried, but it's all focused on her and he doesn't look away to notice Jakob’s attention. “I know there's like a rivalry between girls in the two leagues, but it’s a little crazy that it crosses friendship lines?”

It’s a thought she’s had word for word, but it feels wrong when he says it anyway. She’s at least spent this much time worrying about whether she did the right thing, or whether she should be more principled or something to that effect, and all he’ll do after five minutes of back story is attribute it all to cattiness.

She stays quiet though; he probably does mean well.

“I guess I knew what I was getting in for, right?” Eliana sighs and turns toward her, and, well, Calla hadn’t.

“Pretty much,” she says anyway. Calla hadn’t really thought further than that the NHL didn’t draft from the SDHL. Maybe if they did, she'd be there now.

“So that's it? You wanna play here you just lose all of your friends?”

“Yea, but you know, you guys aren't the worst company,” she jokes, and looks appraisingly at Calla. “Well maybe Calla is when she's cranky.”

“Hey fuck you.” Calla elbows her in the side. “See if I get you anything for your birthday now.”

“Okay, we're gonna throw you the best birthday this weekend, and you're not even gonna remember you ever had other plans,” Jakob declares and turns around to sit back down properly in his chair.

Ekholm follows slowly, but he looks between them both and she thinks he's going to ask more before he must decide against it.

She looks over at her cousin who’s uncharacteristically sulking - not swayed by Jakob’s promise, presumably. It’s not exactly the happy mood she had wanted for Eliana’s first game, but then losing hadn’t helped that either.

Calla should probably sympathize a little more, but somehow looking at Eliana moping over the loss and hearing the boys in front of her, it all just makes her mad. She’s mad at Eliana’s friends for making her sad on her birthday. She’s mad at Eliana for airing the dirty laundry to the boys, even if it is somewhat of a well known secret. She’s mad at the boys for thinking they’re somehow better than these girls who are just standing up for equality the way they think they must.

She should probably just stew in it all a little, but instead she says to her right, “Look, you made your decision, Lis, you’ve just gotta live with it now.”

Eliana startles and looks at her cousin with wide eyes. “I know I did. I _know,_ but maybe, I don’t know... Maybe I can make them understand. Maybe it’s not too late to go back-”

“If you want to wait around on those girls and make sure you don’t hurt their feelings, go ahead, Lis,” Calla says firmly, “but I’m going to the NHL, and I’m not going to wait on anyone. Not you, not them, not anyone.”

Eliana looks at her, wide eyed and defeated, and Calla regrets snapping a little. Just a little.

She lets the quiet settle over them for a minute, debating whether she should say something, but eventually reaches to grab her cousin’s hand and hopes it conveys all the things she doesn't really want to figure out how to say.

That it sucks and she knows exactly how it feels, but they just have to work hard and power through, like everything else. That she has an ally if nothing else, even if she doesn't know how to be a good one. Part of it must get through because Eliana smiles softly, shuts her eyes and lets them both sleep the rest of the way home.

Calla is walking back to the car after they get back to Gävle when Mattias nudges her.

“Hey, before…” Mattias pauses and looks like he’s thinking hard about what to say next. She lets her bag fall to rest on the ground a little. Elis is already most of the way back to their car, out of hearing distance. “When you told Eliana that you weren’t gonna wait for her -”

“I know it was harsh,” Calla interrupts. “But she’s gotta get over that - it’s not going to help her if she’s stuck on the fence.”

“No, I know, that’s not what I was going to say,” he fumbles.

She doesn’t wait for him to continue. “It’s just, if she holds herself back for those girls, she’s not helping anyone. Sometimes you have to do it for you - not for any of the people you love, just you. I don’t know how to help her any better than that- to show her it’s okay to be selfish.”

“That’s...” he starts to say, but his brow is furrowed and he eventually continues carefully. “That doesn’t seem selfish - giving all of that up to play here.”

“Maybe if I cared less about myself, about getting to the NHL,” Calla shakes her head and nods toward her cousin who is already most of the way to the car. “We could both be in the women’s league instead, care more about the women’s game than ourselves. But the NHL, that’s my dream.”

He smiles faintly with one side of his mouth, but he still seems a little confused.

It’s probably more than she’s ever said to Ekholm at one time, and she’s exhausted in more ways than one, so Calla doesn’t stay for him to say something else. She shrugs and picks up her bag to get in the car with Eliana.

Maybe the mood will fade when she’s curled up in her own bed.

“Hey,” he calls, catching her attention enough that she turns around. “I’ll see you there.”

“What?”

“The NHL, I’ll see you there.”

In spite of everything, it makes her smile. “Race you.”

&

_November 2016_

She and Fil don’t really talk about it. They mention it immediately when he and Ekky get back to town, and they gloat in the car about how punctual they are now that Matti isn’t driving with them, but they don’t _talk_ about it. They don’t talk about how they’re both feeling a little abandoned mostly because neither is big on the _Talking About Feelings_ thing, but also because they still see him all the time, so how can they feel abandoned?

If moving across town was an attempt to avoid them, it was short sighted - you can’t really avoid anyone when you play on the team like they do. But if moving across town was an attempt to avoid them, well, she spends more time than she should thinking about why he would even want to.

It’s weird when she gets in Fil’s car every day instead of Matti’s. It’s weird when she buys groceries and he’s not one line over. It’s weird that she just can’t walk across the hall anytime she wants to know what he’s up to. It’s not something she’s known about the rest of the team - what fills up their time outside of the rink - but it’s something she’s always had for him and Fil.

And it’s _lonely_. It helps that Arvi and Fiala are up for good now, and she tries to fill in those gaps with them, but it’s not really the same.

Some days it makes her sad that there are these big chunks of time that they used to share, but mostly it makes her mad because she’s always been crankier than she’s been whiny, and whatever her boys say about her, she does _not_ pout. It’s more of a sulk.

The locker room notices in the sense that they don’t show up as a three person set anymore, but aside from sort of weird looks from Elly and Jos that persist deep into November, they let it go with minimal harassment.

Mostly the team is too busy trying to figure themselves out all miserable October than to try to dig a little deeper into what probably just looks like Ekky growing up and moving out of their little joint bachelor pad.

In truth, it hasn’t been a bachelor pad since Jen moved in with Fil last year and slotted into their little family and traditions so easily. Now Calla feels a little more like a third wheel at their group dinners.

On the plus side, Fil’s poached salmon tonight is _way_ more edible than previous attempts. Calla and Jen agree on this over the dinner table at Fil’s apartment and he hasn’t been able to stopping smiling since, even as he stuffs his mouth with another large bite of asparagus.

“Tenth time’s the charm,” Calla explains, hoping to wipe away a bit of the smugness. He rolls his eyes a little, but the smile stays.

“At least we haven’t found any bones like last time,” Jen says, cutting a bite suspiciously.

“Or the first time you tried and Matti didn’t even chew the first bite?” Jen laughs at that and it’s clear she hasn’t heard this version, so Calla continues, “He just like stood up and went to the kitchen without a word and spit it out. And then started heating up some soup that he had ready waiting for Fil’s fuck up.”

“And I thought him giving up after 3 bites last time was bad.”

That was the first ‘family’ dinner she’d joined them for. There had been high enough hopes for Fil’s solo cooking effort that Ekky hadn’t even hovered in the kitchen deciding whether or not he should help. He had come out to the couch where Calla usually watched tv alone while waiting for the boys to cook, and sat between Jen and Calla. Later, they’d ordered take out between laughs and spent the night listing things around the living room they’d rather try to eat than Fil’s salmon.

Fil’s having none of Jen and Calla’s reminiscing though. “Yea, yea, at least I kept trying.”

Calla shrugs and takes another bite. “I know my strengths.”

“Letting the boys cook for you?”

“Exactly.”

It feels enough like the little family she used to have that she forgets how disjointed things have felt lately. Without second guessing herself the next day at practice, she excitedly pulls Fil over to the defensemen’s side of the locker room to tell Matti about Fil’s cooking achievement.

His eyes light up, presumably at the opportunity to throw Fil under the bus, and he insists, “Well there wasn’t anywhere to go but up.”

Calla laughs. She looks down at Ekky’s eyes looking up at her and, for a moment, lets herself laugh with just him, even if the rest of the team is there too.

She looks away as soon as she can make herself, just in time to see Fil flip them both off.

“Now if you can get Calla cooking for herself, you have raised two whole adults,” Josi jokes, stretching behind PK to pat Ekky on the back.

Calla’s not too busy giving Roman a dirty look to miss how Ekky’s face freezes a little, how Elly furrows her brow a little noticing the same. It must not be anything significant though, because he recovers quickly enough to say, “I was lucky if I got her to chop vegetables.”

“That’s okay, Jarny,” PK says, reaching out to punch her arm lightly, “We can’t all be cooks; some of us have to wash the dishes.”

Elly, Fil and Ekky laugh loudly, which is _rude_ , and it causes PK and Jos to follow suit. Just because she never really volunteered to clean up when the boys cooked doesn’t mean she’s incapable. She probably would have if they’d ever asked her to, but that wasn’t really part of Matti’s caretaker routine.

“Man, they just let you sit there and look pretty?” PK asks admiringly and pretends to tear up. “Calla, you are living _the dream_.”

She shrugs again and lets her boys roll their eyes at her. It’s not even like that’s a battle they lost; they never really tried to make her do more.

Roman looks at Ekky and says with a grin, “Next time you have to make her pull her weight a little, yea?”

He shakes his head a little and opens his mouth to respond, but stops. No one else seems to think anything of him not responding, so Calla doesn’t call it out and lets the quiet laughter at Jos end the conversation.

Ryan changes the subject anyway, and Fil heads back to his stall. Calla walks back over to her own, lets herself fall back in to her routine, but it settles over her uncomfortably. She doesn’t know what he was going to say, but she hears this loud and clear: He’s not going to be there next time either.

She thinks of a world she’s built in her head, an absent-minded fantasy she’s never let herself tug on enough to solidify - of her and Matti on a couch while his dinner cooks in the room over, of coming home from a game and passing out beside each other, of standing at a furniture store arguing over the color of a dining table - together, _always_ together, not because they’re neighbors, but because they share a home.

She thinks of all of these possibilities that had felt intangible every year before now, and suddenly they feel further away than ever. She sits down to finish getting dressed and looks across at him.

She was imagining a home with him, but now she doesn’t even know how his place is furnished, knows pieces probably remain from his apartment, but that there must be whole rooms she’s never seen.

She’s still not used to having these empty spaces in their friendship or having things she doesn’t know about him and he doesn’t know about her.

It is isn’t until now, until he couldn’t even respond to the possibility of a _next time_ that might include him, that Calla starts to think that this might be a permanent change.

&

_March 2014_

Grand Rapids is...well, it’s not great.

It’s a special sort of hell working twice as hard as everyone else to get to the same place and still being told that it’s not enough, and still being told to wait her turn. And, sure, she’s young and the Wings organization is _full_ of centers, but Calla’s never been told she’s not trying hard enough before. All she really wants is to play hockey. To play real minutes. The _chance_ to earn that spot she’s being told to wait for.

She wouldn’t be the Wings’ first girl, but she is the only one in Grand Rapids right now. Men are mean everywhere, especially the young boys hoping to get a chance at the big time, but it’s not the same as being the only girl in Gävle. In Gävle, she went back to her parents every night. She knew where to get anything she needed. She’d been going to the same doctors and stores and parks since she could remember, and she’d never even realized how comforting the familiarity of it all had been. In Gävle, she knew how to fit in, how to be tough and give shit right back.

It’s not like she hasn’t made friends, because video games translate easily across all languages when you’re in a room full of teenagers, although maybe her honestly superb trash talking does not.

But even with a few of the guys she’s friendly with crammed around the TV on the couch because she doesn't have any other chairs in the room, her apartment here feels empty and cold. And even with the few fellow countrymen who are around, she feels trapped in her own head - quiet and homesick instead of snarky and fierce.

Probably she’s just romanticizing her first year or two on Brynäs; she tries to remember it was hard at first there too. No one ever told her to go back to the women’s league in Gävle, but then, she wasn’t warming the bench in Gävle either.

Going back home is more of a fantasy than an actual decision she’s considering, the same way she sometimes wonders if she’d be lighting it up in one of the women’s leagues by now, if she hadn’t been so set on the NHL.

But then she gets a call from her agent telling her her rights have been traded to Nashville, which is simultaneously relieving and terrifying in its own right. What if it’s not any better than it is here? What if she’s still not good enough?

Her agent ends his call with, “Isn’t Ekholm a buddy of yours?” which is weird enough for how he phrases it, but Calla’s not sure how true it is either.

It’s not that she and Ekholm weren’t close in Gävle, because to some extent they were. They were friends in the way all of the team was, and even more as one of the younger half of the team. And yea, she used to think about his eyes in a way she’s never confessed to anyone, but that’s neither here nor there.

She still hangs out with him and the guys over the summers, but they’re both individually closer to Silfver than to each other. It’s a relationship built entirely off of when they happen to see each other in person and she texts him more in their group chat than individually.

Actually, she’s pretty sure that if she looked at the last text they sent each other individually it might be a “happy birthday” text from two years ago.

But here she is, texts trickling in as the news of her trade hits, and he’s _calling_. She makes no attempt to hide her incredulity. “What do you want?”

“Hello to you, too,” he responds, sounding equally as surprised. “I didn’t expect you to pick up.”

Calla laughs a little. “So then why’d you call?”

“I was gonna leave you Pat or Fil’s number if you need a place to crash in Milwaukee.”

Calla rolls her eyes, then realizes he can’t actually see her, and sighs so he can know she’s exasperated. “I don’t know either of those people.”

He ignores her complaint and continues anyway, “I mean Pat’ll be a dick about it, but he’s cool. I don’t actually know Fil that well, but he was up for a few games at the beginning of the year and seemed cool.”

“Wow such promising reviews,” she says, probably giving him a harder time than she needs to. Whatever, it’s a lot to take in right now and she’s not really feeling up for Making New Friends.

“Just take their numbers and call one of them.”

“You could have texted me that.”

She reaches across the couch for the remote control and mutes the TV without turning it off. Along with the couch and a small coffee table, it’s the only substantial piece of furniture in the room; if she turns it off, the apartment starts to feel too large.

At least she doesn’t have a lot to start packing.

“Then you’d just ignore me. I’m serious - call them.”

Calla huffs. He’s right that she would. And he’s obviously just trying to help, but the thought of having to start over again in another sad small American city that’s just on the other side of the Lake isn’t much more appealing than wasting away here in Grand Rapids. “Just because they’re - You just told me you barely even know Fil -”

“Look, I know you don’t know them, but come on, you can’t tell me you didn’t go right to the other Swedes when you got to America.”

Calla stays quiet. She doesn’t want to say anything, knows he’s trying to placate her when he doesn’t even really know whether there’s any truth to the rumors that she hates it here. Maybe she just looks like a disaster to everyone. Maybe he’s trying to puzzle it out now on the phone. She’s not sure she can respond without letting all of that spill out.

She pulls her legs up onto the couch with her and lets out a shaky breath.

“Calla, it’s gonna be okay.”

“I’m fine.”

“No you’re not.” It comes out a little harsh, probably harsher than he means it, because he pauses a moment before continuing. “Look, you’re allowed to miss home without wanting to go back. I get it. I still go over to Horny’s every week for dinner.”

“I just - it was so much easier there.”

“Yea,” he responds, and for a few seconds she thinks he’s going to leave it at that. It’s strange that a single word can be as comforting as it is, but it’s the first time she hasn’t felt alone in a long time. “But this is the dream, Calla. It’s supposed to be hard.”

Without thinking, she replies in English, “You’re supposed to be hard.”

“Wow, living in America has really ruined your insults,” he says, but he’s laughing anyway.

“Maybe I’m just not around people I want to insult anymore,” she says easily, more easily than she has the whole time she’s been in Michigan.

“Well have no fear, the Ads are all idiots. They’ll be lucky to have you.”

“Is that your way of welcoming me to the team?”

“Of course not. I’ll welcome you when you’re here in Nashville.”

It’s a warm thought, the idea that she could maybe have all of the things she used to assume would be hers in Detroit. Not the NHL she thought she’d get on her draft day, but maybe a better one, in Nashville with Ekholm.

“If that ever happens.”

“Please, I give it a month, max. You can stay on _my_ couch then.”

It’s more than a little appealing, but she’s nothing if not stubborn, so she scoffs, “Gross. I’m not gonna stay with you or Forsberg; you boys are all slobs.”

“Calla, you’re like the biggest slob I’ve ever met.”

“Just because _you’re_ some weird clean guy-” she starts, but Mattias talks over her.

“I was on Lis’ group chat last year when she sent those pictures of how your room -”

“Lis was _just as responsible_ for that mess; that picture was slander.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

“Ugh, I hate you.”

“Uh huh,” he says smugly, because they both know she doesn’t mean it. A beat passes and his voice is softer when he adds, “Hey, I can’t wait to see you.”

“Yea,” she says, looking at the empty coffee table. “You too.”

&

_January 2017_

They get the news that the plane needs work and they’re going to be delayed a few hours, so PK comes up with a plan to kill some time at the Dave & Buster’s up by the Opry. Calla’s not bought on in that, but she and Fil end up leaving the airport anyway.

Roman texts them a little after PK’s group leaves. She hasn’t seen him since the game on Thursday, but he’s not coming with them on the road trip, which means he’s going to be out for longer than a week. It’s exactly what they need right now, _more_ injuries.

That’s also probably how he guilts her and Fil into meeting him at some bar nearby to spend the few hours they have until the plane is ready to go again. She has no idea how long that’s going to be and thinks briefly that she really shouldn’t drink a lot just in case.

She considers saying as much to Jos, or maybe complaining that the booth he sits them down in is a little overkill for the three of them, but before she can say anything, Elly plops down beside her and Ekky and Arvi fill in the seat across.

_Oh_.

Elly bumps her shoulder gently and leans in to mutter, “Nothing can ever stay normal around here anymore, eh?”

Calla shrugs. That’s a little more loaded than she wants to address right now, but probably Elly’s referring to Jos being out or the plane troubles. Or maybe, Calla thinks, following Elly’s eyes across the table, she means the rest of it.

They won their last two games, but things are still only barely turned around. The Avalanche and their 13-26-1 record should probably look like low hanging fruit, but Elly’s right - nothing’s a given right now. They’re down two of their top defenseman, a few forwards too for that matter.

The team is sort of all over the place. _Calla’s_ a little all over the place; she hasn’t had anything more than a superficial chat with her _best friend_ in weeks.

Actually, the way Ekky is looking at Elly, the same annoyed look he gives her when she’s complaining about his warm up routine being off, it’s looking like that question was a whole lot more loaded than she first thought.

“It’s a mess,” she eventually relents, looking back at Elly. “But mess is our normal.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Ryan laughs, nudging Calla’s glass with her own.

Calla takes a sip in response as Ryan does the same and nods her head to get Ekky’s attention.

“How’s your camp thing going, Ekky?” she asks, tone weird and pressing - the one Ryan uses when she’s trying to corral a group of them - which doesn’t really make sense considering the question.

But as soon as Calla wonders why Ryan would have her captain voice on, she forgets it in favor of the question. The camp? As in the camp Fil and Calla have spent over a year telling Ekky he should start every time he waxes poetic about how much he’d loved those as a kid or getting to help with Nealer’s?

Fil must think the same because he leans over the table a bit and asks Ekky, “Are you finally listening to us and starting that camp you keep talking about?”

“Yea something like that,” he says with a bright smile, the same one he always has when he talks about youth clinics, about giving back to the sport and the community. “We’re finalizing the schedule now, but everything else is set. It’s really going to happen.”

Calla bites back her own smile, looking across at his. It’s as infectious as it always was, back when they had to slowly convince him that it wasn’t arrogant or he wasn’t too young to want to give back.

“They’re gonna trust you to teach kids?” Roman says, digging his elbow into Ekky’s arm, and grins proudly when it earns the laughs it was meant to.

“I mean, it’s no worse than Nealer and the Make-A-Wish clinic,” Elly offers with a shrug.

“Yea, that’s true,” Fil agrees. “If we let Nealer teach kids, Ekky’s a little bit of an improvement, yea?”

Ekky rolls his eyes and dryly responds, “I’ll try to be.”

“Is it girls and boys?” Elly asks, and Calla knows the answer before he’s said it, not just because they’d talked about it before, but also because even with this year the way it’s gone, she thinks she still knows him, still knows what he would want.

“It’s both,” Fil says as Ekky answers the same.

She turns to look at Fil and tries to find something on his face to match what she’s feeling. He probably hasn’t spoken to Ekky about it any more recently than Calla has, is probably remembering the same idle plans laying on her couch at the end of last season.

It’s weird to think that it’s gone from nothing to actual tangible plans all without them knowing, all without her involvement.

She gives up on searching Fil’s face and asks, “Is there still a spot for me to come help?”

Matti’s brows furrow for just a second before unfolding again. He looks a little surprised. “You still want to?”

She keeps herself from saying _of course_ , partly because that would be coming on way too strong and partly because it hurts that he has to ask. Instead she says haughtily, “Well how else are you going to get kids to sign up? No one’s going to want to learn from just you.”

It probably doesn’t fool anyone, but it doesn’t ever have to. He rolls his eyes again, but his mouth curls a little at the edges and his eyes have that fond look in them she hasn’t seen for a while, at least not directed at her.

Calla’s phone vibrates on the table and all of the other phones do too. That’s a pretty good sign that it’s the group chat, so she doesn’t pick it up to check - lets Fil and Jos look first. It might be news on the plane, but it’s more likely highlights from Dave and Busters.

“Hey, if you’re serious,” Ekky says, looking at Calla while everyone checks the chat.

She waits a few seconds for him to finish the thought, but when he doesn’t, she says, “Yea, just tell me when.”

Elly and the other boys are laughing at their phones, so Calla guesses it’s not updates on takeoff. She glances over at her lock screen and sees that notifications are pretty steadily coming in.

She swipes onto a random alert, ending up with a video of Willy and Watty shoving at each other while trying to succeed at a dance routine. There are a few versions of that, actually.

Fil leans over to show her a different video, so she drops her phone back on the table to rack up its notifications in peace.

On Fil’s phone, an animatronic Homer Simpson is blocking a plain white soccer ball that’s being repeatedly kicked at it, by what looks and sounds like PK, but he isn’t quite in camera. It’s hard to hear anything but a bunch of the guys cackling through the phone’s speakers, but she hears an “in your face” from the machine through bursts of laughter.

The video that comes after shows a scoreboard of _00_ and PK failing to look embarrassed.

“At least he knows he’s terrible,” Fil says.

“Which one’s that?” Arvi asks across the table.

“The one with PK and the soccer game,” Fil says, tilting the phone a little to show the Simpsons video.

“Did you see the second part?” Ryan laughs. “He _literally_ scored zero.”

“He _is_ terrible at soccer,” Roman offers like it’s an explanation.

“Sure,” Elly agrees, looking down at her phone still. “I mean, not as bad as Ekky, but still, pretty bad.”

“Yea, yea,” Ekky says, having given up on arguing this point earlier in the year.

“If you played that game, probably you’d do even worse,” Jos continues.

They all laugh, and Arvi asks, “How can you be worse than zero?”

“He’d be so bad, the game would give him negative points,” Ryan explains, like it’s obvious.

Eventually the group chat changes from games to prizes, which means a picture of Tony posing with a Super Mario plush, eyebrows raised and eyes wide to match the doll’s face; a video of Watty trying to get Juuse to choose between a red and brown M&M plush; someone’s hand (Willy’s, she thinks), covered in tiny rubber tentacles, stroking Irwin’s stubble; the red M&M plush laying in front of a ring pop awkwardly stuffed around the gloved hand of the brown M&M.

She’s still on the last snap - the M&M proposal - when Ekky nudges her foot under the table with his own.

She looks up at him and he gestures down to the picture on her phone. “Did you see Jakob and Clara got engaged?”

She hadn’t, but it’s good news. Her smile grows and she says, “Finally. How long has it been, ten years?”

“Almost,” he admits.

She should text Jakob, maybe harass him about not telling her. Maybe she should have seen it on Clara’s facebook, but she can’t actually remember the last time she logged on. Jakob doesn’t know that, but even if he did, he’d probably expect Mattias to tell her.

She wonders briefly if he’s ghosting on Jakob too, or if it’s just her and Fil.

“Calla, do you just not use the internet at all anymore?” Fil asks. “How did you not see that?”

She shrugs. “I just don’t check that stuff often.”

“You don’t even just look at other peoples’ posts?”

Calla turns to her other side thinking Elly will side with her here; Calla may only post on any social media like twice a year, but that’s more than Ryan can say.

Instead, Ryan shakes her head and tsks. “Sorry, there’s only room for one hermit on this team, and it’s me. You’re gonna have to start posting once a month at least.”

“I don’t know why you’re all obsessed with posting your whole life everywhere.”

“It’s the same as this,” Arvi says, holding up his phone and the group chat, “just to more people.”

“Yea, Calla, maybe if you had more friends,” Jos says tilting his glass across the table in her direction.

She glares a little and gives him the finger, but turnabout is fairly obvious here. “So when can I expect your own engagement post?”

And just like old times, Ekky picks up her bit and adds a little more, saying to Fil, “And you and Jen? Gonna try to beat Jos to the punch, buddy?”

“What?” Fil makes a face and the table laughs at him as he scrambles to save it, “I mean, not soon. We’re good, it’s good, there’s just no rush, you know?”

“Oh my god, Fil,” Elly says in between laughs. “Maybe try to sound a little less terrified next time.”

“Yea, good thing she didn’t hear that,” Arvi smiles.

Ekky’s quiet, wiping at the condensation on his glass, and he doesn’t look away from it when he asks faintly, “How is she doing?”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” Fil says quickly, a little angrily.

It’s abrupt for the mood. She looks between the two, torn between wanting to have literally any other conversation right now and wanting to confront him herself. She bites her lip and looks back down at her drink, mostly empty, not wanting to meet eyes with anyone else at the table.

It’s not like she doesn’t get where Fil’s coming from. She’s spent _months_ figuring out all of the ways Mattias bled into her life only to leave holes behind. But she doesn’t really feel mad right now, can’t really name _what_ it is she’s feeling, just that she doesn’t want to make this bigger, wants to get back to feeling like they all fit together again.

“I’m...” Ekky starts, maybe to say he’s sorry, maybe to say something else. “I didn’t…”

“It’s fine, man,” Fil says, not waiting for him to finish, no sign in his voice that he was ever angry about any of it. “Just come over for dinner after the road trip. Make it up to her.”

He doesn’t say ‘make it up to _us_.’

“Yea, Fil can cook that one meal he’s capable of making,” Elly says at the same time as Roman adds his own, “What, we don’t get an invite?”

“Yea, I can do that,” Ekky says and then, like he’s reconsidering it a little bit, he adds firmly, “I’d like that.”

She looks up then, something bubbling in her stomach like nervousness, but it’s not quite that. He’s looking at Fil at first, but his eyes flicker to her and he asks, “You too, yea?”

She nods.

“It’s okay, I’m busy that night,” Jos continues.

The group chat lights up on all of their phones simultaneously, and instead of another selfie with a stuffed animal, they get Fish telling them the flight’s going to take off the next morning.

It means they can just go home at this point and, with the mood a little confused, it doesn’t take long for them to finish the round of drinks and get up to go.

Fil, Arvi and Ekky are already out the door, but Calla takes a few glasses up to the bar and ends up trailing behind Elly and Roman as they walk toward the exit.

Elly wiggles her eyebrows at Roman and holds her hand up at her shoulder for a high five. “I _told_ you.”

He shakes his head, somewhere between exasperated and fond, but also does eventually high five her. “Yea, yea, Ryan, you’re an evil genius.”

“What’s that about?” Calla asks, and both turn a little surprised to see her.

Elly laughs abruptly, and Roman says, “Hey, I didn’t get to thank you for defending my honor the other night.”

It’s not an answer - is in fact a very obvious _avoidance_ of an answer - but it does remind her of his injury and that he’s not coming with them on the road trip.

She glares a little at them both, tries to convey that she knows they’re up to something, but instead of calling them out she says dryly, “Any time.”

The thing is, she doesn’t really know what they’re up to, but she’s pretty sure the weird feeling she hasn’t been able to name all night is _hopeful_ , and that’s probably thanks to them. The season, the injuries, even that nagging feeling that she’s missing one of the biggest parts of her life, it all feels a little better now. Like maybe he misses them just as much. Like maybe they’re going to turn this season around into something bigger.

&

_January 2016_

Matti gets the game winner in overtime on the road and usually they go out to celebrate, but it’s a Webs-mandated defenseman bonding night, so Calla changes into pajamas, walks over to Fil’s room and they try to stream one of the earlier SHL games on the shitty hotel wifi.

Seth had suggested they meet them for drinks after, but Calla had entertained that idea only as long as it took to get back to her hotel room and change out of her suit.

Usually when they go out with the defense, Calla hangs out with Roman and Fil, and lets Matti provide a buffer between them and Seth and Elly. It’s an old habit from when she felt like Fil and her were intruding on Matti’s other friendships, and when she didn’t really know how to get along with the defense.

Calla had mostly just felt overwhelmed around Ryan and Seth when she first went up to Nashville. The first year, she and Ryan were still on ELCs and Ryan hadn’t had a roommate until she showed up at the end. It’s better this year, now that she's had all of last year and they both get their own rooms.

Calla knows she’s not great at new people - she’s quiet at first, and once you get past that she’s kind of an asshole, honestly. And she’s not trying to blame the language thing, but it doesn’t help. The stupid crush she hasn’t had in years is definitely _not_ a problem even if she does sort of resent the easy going comradery of the young defensemen. But it’s not them specifically, she’s pretty sure, it’s just hard to fit into existing friendships.

Now, it’s easy to let whatever lingering awkward feelings she still has go unnoticed behind Ryan and Seth’s codependence and Roman and Seth’s general antics, but it’s still tiring, and passing out on Fil’s other bed while he tries to find another game sounds like a good enough night. Besides, they’d gone out last night with Eliana.

There’s a knock on the door and she turns to look at Fil, like it’s possible he ordered room service without her hearing sometime during the first game. He shrugs and hops up to answer it, and Calla props herself up on her elbows to get a better angle at the door.

“Hey slackers,” Elly calls from the other side of the door, and when Fil opens it, she’s standing neatly nestled under Matti’s arm. She’s probably just holding him up though.

They’re laughing at something, but whatever it is isn’t in Calla’s hearing range.

“Since you guys couldn’t be bothered to come celebrate with us,” Elly says, pushing Matti into the room with the arm she had looped around his back. “I brought you our game winner post-celebration.”

He gracelessly plops himself down onto the bed Calla’s using and calls out, “Bye, Elly” as Ryan laughs and calls “Goodnight, Ekky” while the door closes on her.

Fil walks back across to his bed and says with a smirk, “You have fun tonight?”

“Yea, Elly convinced Webs to come out with us,” he smiles. It’s a decent accomplishment; Shea doesn’t usually go out with them unless a much larger group is going.

“How’d she do that?” Fil asks, a little surprised.

“She said it was his _captainly_ duty,” he says, laying all the way down onto the other pillow of the bed and looking behind Calla’s back across to Fil. “And that he’d never bought me a drink before.”

Calla nudges his leg with her knee and looks down at him. “Doesn’t he always pay for your defense dinners?”

“Yea, but you know he doesn’t really like _go out_ with us.”

“And you don’t really like _score goals,_ ” Fil mimics.

Before Matti can react, Calla agrees and piles on, “Let alone game winners.”

“Fuck you both,” he says, rolling his head a little into the pillow and closing his eyes. Eventually he opens his eyes and says warmly, “It was really funny, Elly yelling at him like she was the little captain.”

“I thought only Pekka could get away with yelling at Webs.”

“Yea, but she wasn’t like yelling,” he mumbles into the pillow and then straightens up a bit to continue. “She was doing that thing where she just makes you convince yourself. Jos and Jonesy try to get him to come out _all the time_ , and she just, I don’t even know, tricked him. I don’t know if they were pissed or impressed that she finally did it.”

Calla lets herself fall back to lay on the bed beside Matti and stares up at the ceiling.

The boys expect Elly and her to be best friends, like two years ago they should have just bonded instantly over their gender. Or worse, she used to see some of them giving cautious eyes, like they expected them to be catty toward each other because, well, Calla’s not actually sure.

But Ryan went first round, was the Player of the Year before coming up to the NHL, barely played in Milwaukee. Calla couldn’t even make it work well enough in her first AHL team to get a single call up in two years.

Even now, Ryan always handles things so gracefully, always smiles and jokes with the reporters in that polite Canadian way. Apparently she bosses Shea around without him really noticing.

Logically, Calla knows all of the things she’s supposed to do off the ice, even knows she’s not really failing at any of them, but Ryan just makes it look so much easier.

It’s not a big deal. She knows she can't let a little bit of jealousy prove them right, so she tries really hard with Ryan. They’re not like braiding each other’s hair or having sleepovers or anything stupid like that, but it’s better than when they were roommates.

She’s still firmly staring at the ceiling when she blurts out, probably a little too loudly, “Are you dating Elly?”

Fil coughs, so she’s probably going to get harassed for that later, but Matti scrambles to spit out, “What, no. No. Definitely not. I wouldn’t. I don’t want to make it hard for - I know how hard it is for you guys - you girls - whatever. I don’t want to make things harder.”

Probably she should be laughing like Fil is, because that was _a lot_ , but instead she turns her head to look at Matti.

It wouldn't be that hard to roll over and kiss him. She'd barely have to stretch over at all with how he plopped down so close that their arms are pressed together. But he's right, it would be hard to do the rest of it - to date him. If it became public would it distract from hockey? If she had a bad year, would people say she was only there to keep him happy? If she had a good one, would people give him shit about her outshining him and would he resent her for it? What if they tried to keep it private? She's not sure it'd even be possible and he's definitely right that it would make life so much harder here.

But that’s not even what he meant; he's not thinking about making her life easier, he's thinking about Elly. “But you like her?”

He hums. “Not really, not anymore.”

She doesn’t look to see if Fil’s gotten distracted by his phone like he sometimes does, or if he’s grinning like a kid in a candy store at Matti’s slip up. ‘Not anymore’ is more than he would have given if he was sober.

Calla, on the other hand, is a little more preoccupied. She turns her head back to look at the ceiling and asks, “What happened?”

She keeps looking up, doesn’t want to meet his eyes, but she can hear his head shuffle on the pillow. “Nothing. Neither of us would do that.”

Fil must not be too distracted by his phone because he laughs and says, “Man, that must have sucked for Seth; was he just like third wheeling it?”

“Seth wasn’t even there then; it was mostly in Milwaukee.” After a beat he adds, “And nothing happened.”

“Yea, so I should ask Pat?”

“Ugh, he’d be so smug about it. He and Danne just gave me so much shit.”

“About how you definitely weren’t dating Elly?”

“About _liking_ her. We didn’t - nothing happened,” he insists again and it definitely reads to Calla like protesting too much.

Fil must not be any more convinced than Calla because he continues, “So if I text Pat right now, what’s he gonna tell me?”

“If he’s even awake yet,” Calla points out, not really sure how late it is.

“He’ll tell you I was like a sad puppy. Or just say the grossest thing he can think of.”

Calla laughs; that’s pretty spot on. “Yea, or just like a weird string of emojis that he probably means to be dirty.”

“He’s a fucking asshole,” Matti says, but it sounds pretty fond. Sure enough, a beat later he adds, “I still wish he’d made it.”

It’s clear his thoughts are scattered right now and she’s not really following whatever logical leaps his brain just took, but Calla can appreciate the sentiment anyway. They all have friends who wanted to be here and didn’t quite get there, or some that never even came close.

Pat’s maybe the only one they all share, since Fil wasn’t in Gävle with them, but he’s not really on the short list of people Calla misses most. Still, she knows he was core in Ekky’s little family away from home before she and Fil ended up in Nashville and she knows how he is, how he always does everything he can for the people he loves.

Something about the thought sits heavy in her gut, but it’s not something she wants to name, so she shrugs against the bed and says quietly, “Sucks.”

Matti nudges Calla softly and she lets herself turn back to meet his eyes. “It’s like you told me back with Brynäs, you can’t let it hold you back.”

“When did I say that?”

“The night Lis joined the team. Her old friends cancelled her birthday or something.”

“I remember that night, but I don’t remember giving you advice.” It wasn’t a great night. They had lost and Calla had to try to give Eliana a pep talk. “What’d I say?”

“I don’t know, you just talked about doing things for yourself. And like no matter how much you want to help your loved ones, sometimes you have to take care of yourself first. You have to do it for you.” He looks at her a little exasperated with her obvious lack of recognition. “Calla, I think about that all the time - what you told me that night.”

It’s a little absurd to her, that she ever gave him advice to prioritize himself but also that he thinks about it as often as he supposedly does when he’s like the least selfish person she can think of.

He blinks slowly keeping his eyes on hers and breathes heavily against the pillow, mouth a little agape. He’s probably still pretty drunk.

“So what you’re saying is, Calla gave you advice on how to be selfish?”

She startles a little bit, turns back toward Fil, and gives him a lazy glare. “Teach what you know.”

Her boys both laugh.

She walks across to her room that night with a strange feeling she can’t shake. She’d call Lis, but it’s the middle of the night and she doesn’t really want to talk about it anyway. Not to mention, she saw Lis yesterday when they all had dinner, and Lis is somewhere on a plane to Edmonton right now.

She doesn’t call Lis and she doesn’t do anything stupid like cry into her pillow, but she does lay in bed staring blankly at the popcorn ceiling wondering why she feels a giant weight on her chest and why she feels like she lost something she never even had.

&

_March 2017_

Fil gets hat tricks in back to back games, and even though they’d only ended up with 1 point out of the first game, the second they manage to win. They’ve been losing as much as they’ve been winning lately, and Calla knows it’s going to be a fight to even get to a wild card spot.

Calla is on the top of every Vegas draft prediction for Nashville. She doesn’t know quite what to think of it, knowing the commitment made to her during her contract signing. She isn’t worried for herself - knows the predictions don’t have the benefit of knowing what she does - but she is worried about how things really will play out and who they _will_ end up leaving off the list.

This particular article has Joey, Arvi, Fil and Nealer saved with little discussion and is instead debating who Vegas should pick from her, Smitty and Sissons.

She’s sitting on Ekky’s couch, half reading the article on her phone, half watching Arvi and Fil play FIFA while Ekky’s showing Jen and Moa something in the kitchen.

She’d wandered his home when they first got here, looking at the furniture in each room like it would finally answer that lingering question and fill in the rest of the holes left from this year. She’d given up and settled on the couch quickly when the pit in her stomach was just getting worse.

Matti’s been over to their places a few times since January, and they’ve all been over to Joey’s and Roman’s a few times, but this is the first time they’ve spent any time at his place.

It isn’t the same as walking across the hall, requires more planning than hanging out ever did before, but something about it being intentional feels nice too. Like they’re making a spot in their lives for each other instead of just falling in two parallel lines. Like even though they spend more time surrounded by the rest of their friends, he’s still there in that steady way.

Still, something is definitely missing; she feels a little like she’s intruding on a mystery, or like she’s a guest in this scene instead of a member of a family. She tries her best to ignore it and reminds herself that just because things are weird doesn’t mean they aren’t better than before.

Things have been good, mostly, since they talked in January. At least she seems him outside of the rink more.

“You know what they say about reading your own press.”

She turns around from where she’s sitting on his couch and sees Ekky reading over her shoulder.

She doesn’t say that she’s more worried about him or whoever else they leave off the list than she is about her own spot on it; she knows what they promised her. Instead she says, “Oh please, you can’t say you don’t read your own press.”

“I haven’t had any press since Trotz left.”

Calla laughs dryly and so does Fil on the other end of the couch; it’s a common joke for them, even though neither she nor Fil played much for Trotz. She lowers her phone to her lap, eyes still following him.

“You still shouldn’t read that stuff.” He drops down on the chair beside her end of the couch.

He doesn’t look back over at her when he says it; his eyes are locked on the TV screen. In fact, she’s certain if they were locked on her instead she’d tell him right then and there. It’s already on the tip of her tongue, the way it always is when she reads these articles. And now, he’s specifically trying to keep her from worrying about next year, it’s like the universe is telling her to go ahead, with how perfectly timed his comment is.

“Ahh come on!” Arvi yells, as the TV lets out it’s own loud ‘Goal!’ and Fil gives a small cheer.

That stirs her from the fantasy a little bit.

Right, Arvi and the girls are here too. Some part of her figures Fil told Jen, but if she ignores that, she thinks telling Matti and Fil is really as far as she can stretch “don’t tell anyone.”

“What’re you reading?” Jen asks, sitting down in between Calla and Fil in the middle of the couch.

Calla pulls her legs in toward herself so that Jen has a little more room, and sits her phone down on her lap. “Just Vegas rumors.”

“Oh,” Jen says, lets it hang awkwardly. Maybe Fil didn’t tell her. For a second, she looks like she wants to say something, but she knows Calla pretty well and gives her a small smile instead.

Calla sees Fil look over at her from Jen’s other side, and then he looks past her, presumably at Ekky. As he turns back to the TV and the game, he catches her eye, small grin forming, and jokes, “Calla’s just trying to figure out her schedule so she can get us all tickets for the Ed Sheeran tour.”

They all laugh at it, but then Arvi asks, a little more enthusiastically than Calla can reasonably explain, “Wait, is that real?”

“The concert or Calla buying us all tickets?”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “The concert; I know Calla didn’t suddenly remember where her wallet is.”

Moa nudges him from where she’s sitting beside him on the oversized chair. “Don’t you read your Bridgestone Arena concert announcements?”

“Not really,” he says, but he’s pausing the game and pulling up the announcement on his phone. “Can we go though?”

“When is it?” Jen asks, looking at her phone. Calla doesn’t look at her own; if she’s going to get dragged along to a Ed Sheeran concert, she’s not going to be active in the planning. Besides, they don’t have their game schedule yet, so she doesn’t really have any plans to contribute.

“October 6 and 7,” Viktor reads, and then quickly asks, “Is that the weekend we got Titans tickets?”

“No that’s the next weekend,” Jen answers. “Monday, actually.”

“Okay, so then we’re good. Who’s in?”

Calla says a very convincing “Fine” at the same time as the girls both say, “Me!” and Ekky says, “Pass.”

“What, you think you’re too good for Ed Sheeran?” Moa asks. “Even Calla said _fine._ ”

“I can’t think that far in the future,” he says, which isn’t exactly out of character for someone as bad at being on time as he is, but it doesn’t strike Calla as true either. It’s not like it’s the first time they’ve bought concert tickets in advance. It reminds her instead of earlier in the season, when he was avoiding plans at all cost.

“Hey, speaking of, you never answered whether you were coming with us to the Titans game.”

“Oh, yea, we got you a ticket,” Jen says, looking up from her phone over to Ekky.

He shrugs again. “It’s not like one of the other guys won’t take it.”

Calla worries her lip and looks back down at her phone to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes.

“What does that mean?” Arvi asks.

But Ekky talks over Viktor and deflects with, “Why’d you get them so early anyway?”

Fil shrugs, “August’s coming in to town and wanted to go, so we bought them when he got his flight.”

The subject change works well enough with the crowd, and Calla would rather stew than call it out. If he’s back to avoiding them even in future hypotheticals, she isn’t going to say anything.

It’s just, Calla’s never thought to plan for a future where they aren’t all together.

& _ _

_July 2016_

Pekka is the first one on the team she talks to after she signs her new contract in July, maybe because he somehow knew, but probably just because he wanted to check in on her anyway.

“How’re things going with the contract?” he asks casually, ten minutes in, once he’s apparently satisfied with dancing around the subject for long enough.

“All done actually,” she admits, letting it settle over her warmly. Not just that he’s thought to call, but that it _really is_ all done. She gets to keep things exactly as they are. “You’re stuck with me for a few more years.”

Calla’s expecting a joke back, but he stops short of whatever he was going to say and just sort of tsks into the receiver.

“You still there?” she asks eventually.

“Yea, just, that’s what Shea said after he signed too,” he says, tone vague and distracted. “His contract was a little longer, I’m guessing.”

Calla hasn’t talked to many people since the trade. Fil and Matti, obviously, and Shea himself had reached out, but this is a conversation that probably merits a little more emotional finesse than she has.

“You can remember that long ago?” she jokes instead.

“Well, sure, I wasn’t still in diapers then, so it’s not hard to remember,” he says easily.

Which, yea, Pekka knows her well enough to stay in her comfort zone, but maybe that’s not fair to him. He brought Shea up; maybe he’s trying to let some steam off.

“Have you talked to him?” There’s no way the answer is no, but it gives him the chance to say anything he might want to.

But Pekka doesn’t take the chance to unload anything, and instead asks, “Webs or Subban?”

It catches her off guard. She doesn’t really know anything about PK Subban, short of what he projects to the world, doesn’t really know how he’ll fit into their team.

But the hole that Shea will leave behind, that she knows. Maybe there are some captains in the league that take that title lightly or lead in softer, more intangible ways, but Shea is everything he’s advertised to be.

Calla knows he was more to the defensemen: an idol, a protector, a role model, a father figure all-in-one. She knows that she’ll never really get what he means to Ekky and the rest of them, but he was a little bit of that to all of them, from Calla’s first game up til the very end.

Most of her new contract was settled before the trade, but it certainly hadn’t helped her anxiety during that last month between the news and her signing on the dotted line. For all that she’d been fantasizing about keeping her home exactly as is, he’s a pretty big linchpin to lose.

“Webs,” she answers, but then, “either, I guess.”

“Yea, we talked,” he responds. “He’s fine, you know, as much as you can be. I don’t know if he saw it coming, but, it’s hockey.”

It’s not that Calla doesn’t know that, it’s just, she’s never really managed to be less attached to things, a little more ready for a trade. She knows in this job it could happen any day, and it wouldn’t necessarily be to a Washington or Carolina, where she could count on some sense of familiarity. It could take her somewhere with nothing but the cold empty apartment she used to have in Grand Rapids.

At least she’s accumulated more furniture since then.

“It’s fine, Calla,” he says after a pause. “I called to make sure _you_ were okay, not the other way around.”

It’s not a proud moment for Calla, but he’s not far off. Some small part of her has always been afraid Nashville wouldn’t want to re-sign her. It’s the same part of her that always thinks back to Grand Rapids, back to when she wasn’t good enough and when she spent all of her time fantasizing about running back to Gävle and her parents and the safety of the world she knew.

Maybe it’s a little bit of that fear that made her sign for less than she could have. The fear of a different world she doesn’t know. The fear that she isn’t good enough or worth more. Her agent tries to dance around that as much, pushes a harder stance than she maybe would have herself.

But he gets her more than money; he comes back with a promise. She never would have thought to ask for it, but it immediately eases the current of anxiety that’s been running through her since the NHL announced the expansion draft rules in June.

The money and the time on the contract are good enough, she doesn’t need anything crazy, and if that’s the trade off for that sort of promise, then she can live with it.

Calla doesn’t need a lot, just home, here with all of them. Besides, she knows Fil’s still negotiating too so if she takes a little less, that helps him. And if she signs until the same year as Ekky, that’s just a coincidence.

“Ekky’s trying to figure out who Subban will play with,” she offers, mostly just to say something.

Pekka laughs. “So did you tell Elly he’s trying to get rid of her?”

“No, but I should,” she grins, making a mental note to text Elly when she hangs up with Pekka. She doesn’t really need an excuse to make fun of Ekky, but it’s a good one anyway and she can talk to her about Shea in a lighter way. “I asked if he remembered how to play with anyone but her.”

“Good question.”

To his continuing credit, Ekky had sat through her insults like he always did, exasperated but mostly fond. It doesn’t matter what front she puts on, Matti knows how she feels about him, because no one sees through her like Fil and Matti. Granted, he probably thinks that it’s like platonic or something along those lines, which honestly sometimes Calla also does, because feelings are complicated and just because he made her a home here and is always there when she needs him doesn’t mean she’s _into_ him. Whatever.

“He said ‘no, she should petition to play for Sweden so he doesn’t make a fool of himself at the World Cup.’”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Pekka offers graciously. “He can make a fool of himself against us as much as he wants.”

It makes her smile and she thinks for one of the first times that she’s excited to watch some of the games.

Even before when she’d be proud of Lias and Ekky, the idea of watching them all play on the same national team had made an ugly pit form in her stomach. Now though, Joey and Nealer have started some plans in the group chat to watch some of the World Cup games together, and she feels light.

Actually, Calla finds herself a little surprised to realize that she can’t wait to go home, even though losing to the Sharks had been the latest she’d ever returned to Sweden, even when Fil and Matti aren’t going to be there for a few more weeks.

&

_May 2017_

In a lot of ways, hugging Jakob in the handshake line is easier for her than it is for Mattias. She’s not really a hard hitter, so even though it’s true that there are no friends in the playoffs, she hadn’t really done anything he’d need to cool off over. And yea she’s been close to him for a while, but not as close as Matti and him are.

Still, he gives her a firm hug, presses right against her ear to tell her “go get ‘em” over the roar of the Nashville crowd. But she’s so far back in the line everyone is rushing and it’s gone quickly.

It _all_ goes quickly. The whole celebration - receiving the Campbell Bowl, Joey and Fiala rushing out as fast as anyone could possibly manage on ice with crutches, PK’s unending infectious smile - it all feels fast. They end up at Roman’s house after, physically exhausted but restless and buzzing all the same.

She finds Willy early on looking for Sissons, wants to make sure she talks to Colton before his time gets monopolized by everyone wanting to congratulate him on the hattrick, but sure enough he’s already getting swarmed.

Instead she finds Pekka and Juuse in the kitchen on her way to get a drink, and settles beside them, tries to pay attention to what they’re talking about like she’s not just looking for her boys. Her other boys. Whatever.

She’s clearly not fooling anyone though, because by the time she’s refilled her glass, Pekka laughs, shakes his head at her, and walks her over to the far corner of Roman’s downstairs, where Fil and Ekky are sitting and Arvi’s standing up, apparently to go get his own refill.

She’s not sure how any of them are conscious, but the defensemen most of all. But there’s still a buzz throughout the whole house, that sort of manic energy that comes with this kind of win.

They don’t know if it’s going to be the Senators or the Penguins yet, and she knows pockets of people around are debating it. Others are avoiding the subject entirely.

She’d seen Nealer cold turn and walk away from PK and Fish at the briefest mention, which was funny enough that she tells Fil and Ekky as soon as Pekka and Arvi have walked away.

“I thought Fish had insulted Snoopy or something, the way he whipped around with his grumpy face,” Calla explains.

“I guess it’s different playing against your whole former team and not just one of your friends,” Ekky concedes, but he looks like he’s thinking about the latter.

“I mean, you remember how he was our first year all up,” Fil says, which, yea, Nealer’s first year in Nashville was not a flattering sample of his personality, but Calla’s not great at warming up to new things either, so she’s at least going to throw that stone gently.

“Is that how we’re going to be next year?” Ekky says, and she’s definitely not following, but it’s a strangely sad moment considering where they are, what they just did, and the goofy story she’d just been telling.

Fil catches on faster than she does though and he asks immediately, “Are you finally gonna tell us what’s wrong?”

Considering he brought it up, he looks startled by the question. He blinks a little, eyes squinted and distant in a way that she’d attribute to being exhausted if she hadn’t heard their exchange.

Mostly he just looks sad.

“It’s just, I know I tell you not to read what they’re saying about the Vegas draft, but, Calla, you have to know you’re on every list.”

She shrugs. “I’m not worried about that.”

“I know, ‘don’t think about it during the playoffs,’ but sometimes don’t you anyway?”

“They’re going to protect her,” Fil says firmly, and Matti frowns. Calla looks around as soon as he’s said it, makes sure no one else is within hearing range. Arvi’s still over with Fiala, and he’s half sitting down between their girlfriends, so he’s probably not going to walk back over in the next minute.

“I want that too, but there’s still a pretty big chance-” he starts, but Calla doesn’t let him finish.

“No, they’re going to protect me,” she repeats just as firmly and stares at him.

He stops and looks at her like she’s something entirely unknown. “What?”

“When I signed this summer, they promised me. It’s part of why…” Calla doesn’t really know how to continue that, so instead she says, “I just wanted to keep this. Nashville is my home.”

“They promised?” he asks slowly, clearly considering what that means. “Like it’s in your contract?”

“No, they couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t.”

“So it’s not really...real?”

“No, it’s real,” she insists, still trying to speak with certainty when she wants to be whispering. “I wasn’t supposed to say, but I told Fil, and I probably would’ve told you the day you got back if you weren’t avoiding us.”

His eyes dart back and forth between her and, she’s not sure, something behind her. They’re a little unfocused, like they have been all night. They’re all exhausted, but he played over 27 minutes tonight.

“And they’ve got to protect you too, Matti. There’s not much time to trade you and they’re not letting you go for free.”

“I…” he starts, but whatever he’s thinking, he can’t seem to articulate it yet. “That’s…”

Fil doesn’t let him finish though and he’s clearly annoyed when he asks, “Wait, you’ve been weird all year because you thought Calla was going to go to Vegas?”

“I thought _I_ was going to Vegas. Or somewhere else. I saw the rules about the draft and you hadn’t signed your contracts and it just seemed like there was no way we all got through it.”

It’s something Calla can relate to, but it doesn’t really add any clarity to the situation. “You bought a place right after you thought you were gonna be traded at the end of the season?”

Fil’s a little more blunt. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Matti wipes a hand over his face, like clearing sweat from his eyes during a game. The ice in his otherwise empty glass rattles as his other hand shakes a little.

“I - I panicked. You guys are - I just wanted this to be home no matter what, that I could still have something here.” He’s all over the place, emotionally wide open like he only is when he’s not sober. Or apparently very exhausted. “And I thought _there’s no way I’m going to be able to say goodbye to them_ like that, like we were.”

There’s a lot to parse there, but Calla’s not awake enough to try. “You moved out so that it’d be easier to say goodbye to us?”

“That’s really stupid,” Fil says, sticking with his pretty simple position on the subject. He sets his own drink down.

“Yea, when I say it out loud,” he starts to agree, but Fil’s engulfing him in a hug before he can finish, and he’s unsuccessfully trying to keep the ice from splashing out while he loops his own arms around the shorter boy.

“You wouldn’t have had to say goodbye to us,” Fil says, muffled against Ekky. “We’re your family, you idiot.”

He makes a move that Calla thinks is him pulling away from the hug, but instead Fil reaches in to pull her over into it.

She thinks she hears some “Awww’s” from across the room, but she’s pressed against her two best friends and all she can really register is Ekky’s breath on the top of her head and both of the boys’ arms wrapped tight around her back.

She presses her face into his chest for just a second and inhales. Probably if she stays in this hug any longer she’s going to fall asleep in the warmth. With a second deep breath, she tries to school her face into something a little less emotional but, honestly, she’s been missing her best friend all season, she’s allowed to indulge in it a little.

&

_June 2016_

“What about the 8th?” Emma asks, looking at her phone, scrolling through what Calla assumes is her calendar app.

Calla’s sitting with the four other women she trains with during the summer, outside at their favorite spot for lunch. Eliasson and Bäckström are trying to coordinate the next time they can get Andreas out to Gävle for the group.

Jacqueline finishes a sip of water and asks, “When’s the first training camp for Tre Kronor?”

“I don’t think it’s ‘til August,” Nicke answers, not looking up from her own phone calendar. “The 8th works for me.”

Calla takes a bite of her sandwich and looks down at it. She’s never sure how to act when they talk about the World Cup, since she’s the only one of them not playing in it. Hell, now she doesn’t even have Ekky to vent to since he was named in the latest round of additions last week.

“I’m good that whole week,” Eliana says.

“Me too,” Calla adds and Jacqueline nods.

And yea, she always feels a little like she’s punching above her weight when she’s home with these girls, but it doesn’t usually hit her as much as this, when she’s sitting here wondering if she should just head back to Nashville early once they’re all off training for the World Cup.

She could never say that to them though, not to these girls who might never get a chance to represent their country again. At least not as long as Boork is still the women’s national team’s coach and refusing to name any one to the roster who plays in a men’s league. Calla knows how much it means to Eliana and to their family; she doesn’t need late night chats with the rest of them to know it probably means the same to them too.

“Okay, let’s try for the 8th then,” Emma says, typing rapidly on her phone. “And we can talk with him then about how much we want to try to squeeze in before camp.”

Calla doesn’t really talk to any of the other women who were cut from the national team when he took over, certainly not about the Damkronorna, but sometimes she wonders if they feel like Nicke and Emma are responsible for it the same way the two clearly think about themselves. They’d both left for the NHL the same year, both left Brynäs and Boork behind to crash and burn. That next year, when he’d been fired and then brought back at the end, he’d been so bitter that he hadn’t let most of the women on the team play real minutes. Even Jacqueline, who ended up saving them from relegation at the end there, he’d sent down as much as possible.

Nicke doesn’t talk about him, doesn’t talk about the situation at all. She’d been Leif’s favorite in a way that Emma hadn’t, has more of a personal relationship with him that Calla imagines is conflicted and confusing. Maybe that’s why Emma’s a little more vocal on the subject, why she’s trying as hard as she is to make the most of this for everyone, because it’s just that little bit less personal to her.

“Sounds good.”

Eliana is making weird faces across the table, which isn’t really noteworthy in and of itself, but it eventually prompts Jacqueline to shake her head a little and ask, “How’s contract stuff, Calla?”

“Oh my god, Lis, _chill_ ,” Calla says to her cousin instead, because it hasn’t been 48 hours since they last talked about it and trying to get the girls to do her dirty work for her doesn’t really count as the ‘calming down’ they agreed to.

And she understands her family wanting her to get the best contract she can, but Calla doesn’t really care about half of the things they think that means. Calla just wants whatever contract gets her back home.

Losing in the second round might not sound that great, but it’s not just the best they’ve ever done, it’s something bigger than that. Calla can feel something brewing in Nashville. Everyone can. Sure, if she thinks about Game 7 too long, she gets that awful pit in her stomach, but if she thinks about Game 4 and 6, she thinks about Fil falling off the bench in front of her, of that feeling of winning at home, of something more.

She’s _excited_. There’s nowhere else she wants to be. And if that means the number in front of the zeroes is a little smaller than she could get somewhere else, Calla can’t find it in her to care.

“What, I’m just curious,” Lis says unconvincingly.

“Counting down ‘til you guys can be on the same team again?” Emma asks slyly. “Calla, should she be counting in years or decades?”

Calla throws a balled up napkin at her.

A few years ago, she would have given anything to be on one of their teams. She would’ve been the one counting the days to when she could shop around, or use this sort of opportunity to ask for more, probe for a trade.

But even places where she wouldn’t be all alone, places like Carolina or Vancouver that offer her some familiarity, feel worlds away now. Those aren’t the home she’s built and the family she’s made in Nashville.

As much as she loves training in the summer with Backe, Lis, Emma and Marky, it’s Nashville she misses in the quiet summer afternoons. It’s shooting the shit with Jos, and tired evenings off on the couch with Fil and Matti. It’s seeing how long she can get Arvi and Fiala to believe the most ridiculous lie she can manage, or seeing who breaks first between Willy and Elly when Tony says something particularly clueless.

“Calla’s a home body, of course she’s going to sign a long contract,” Nicke replies.

The group all agree pretty easily, but Nicke still watches her like she’s trying to challenge Calla on something.

It’s a little strange to hear. Calla’s just getting used to thinking of Nashville as home instead of Gävle, but of all the people she’d expect to bat an eye at that development, everyone here seems to have gotten the news before her. Maybe that’s what Nicke’s hinting at?

Calla’s phone vibrates against the table, so she picks it up and brings it in close, out of the sun, to read in her own shadow. She’s got a new snap from Cehlin and she opens it without thinking. It’s Ekky and Silfver pressed in together, a black bar over it labeled _“look who crashed our lunch :(.”_ They’re not smiling, trying too hard to look cool probably, but it shows how happy they are.

“What are you smiling at?” Nicke says, kicking her softly under the table.

“Nothing,” Calla says as casually as she can muster, hoping no one’s interested enough to press, or maybe that they’ll keep asking about her contract.

Eliana knows her too well though. “It’s Ekan, yea?”

Calla responds to that with an appropriate glare and no answer.

“What? Who else makes you smile like that?”

She locks her phone and sets it down on the table. “I smile.”

“Yea sure,” Emma says skeptically.

“Please,” she says dismissively, “I laugh at you guys all the time.”

It earns the round of laughter she expects it to, but they don’t let it go. Nicke continues, “Yea, but we’re all here.”

“Whatever, Calla, no one here is fooled.”

In lieu of a response, she stuffs the last piece of her sandwich into her mouth and glares at no one in particular while she chews.

“Have you talked to him since they named him?” Emma asks, either taking pity on Calla or just disinterested in that line of gossip. “Surprised the hell out of me.”

“Mmm, yea,” Eliana says through a large bite of her own food. “I was expecting Klinger, yea?”

Jacqueline hums her agreement but then looks back to Calla and adds hastily, “Not that he doesn’t deserve it.”

And, well, Calla’s not sure why they’re reassuring her, like she’s gonna tell Ekky they don’t think he should’ve been named, so she shrugs a little and answers Emma’s original question. “We got lunch the other day. Didn’t really talk about it.”

Strictly speaking, that’s not true. Strictly speaking, Calla spent fifteen minutes suggesting to him how bad he was gonna look next to all of the actual famous Swedish defenseman because she couldn’t find any other way to tell him how proud she was. But that’s not a thing she needs to recall to the group, so she doesn’t add anything else.

She usually stays quiet when they talk about the tournament and she’s grateful that they seem to be willing to let her do the same now. Mostly she’s still debating whether or not she’s going to head back to Nashville early when they’re off to camp.

Maybe she’ll text Elly and see when she’s coming down - Ryan and her have an understanding when it comes to international tournaments.

Calla wasn’t in Nashville yet when Ryan and Shea brought back their matching gold medals from Sochi, but sometimes Ryan jokes with her about playing against each other in Pyeongchang. Calla never tells her that she doesn’t think she’d get picked anyway, even if Boork hadn’t cut all of the NHL girls the second he took over after Sochi, even if the NHL lets them play.

She’s not Elly and she’s not any of these girls. It’s too easy to imagine this same conversation happening somewhere else, but about her making the Damkronorna instead.

Calla looks at her phone, pulls up the picture of Matti and Jacob and lets herself smile again. She hasn’t seen Jacob since the handshake line. They’d texted after the loss to the Sharks, when she was booking her flight home, but they haven’t gotten around to hanging out yet. She isn’t rushing it. Losing is hard enough when your commiserating friends aren’t part of the reason you lost.

If Pat’s picture is anything to go by, he’s probably cooled off enough.

&

_June 2017_

It’s worse the next year - losing in the finals. Calla’s never felt as terrible in her life and she’s pretty sure she’s only going to feel worse, once this heavy numbness wears off. At no point in the game did she ever feel like they weren’t going to bring it to game 7, but here she is sitting in the stall she’s used all season trying to accept that it’s really over.

Lavi is telling them to be proud of their season, that they should hold their heads high, but most of the room is heads down, hands in hair, and she definitely doesn’t catch most of what Fish quietly says to the room after Laviolette finishes.

Part of her can’t really think beyond her own breath and the fact that _God,_ _it’s really over_ , but the other part is looking around wondering _Who won’t be here next year?_ in a more real way than she ever has before.

This was maybe the last year she was going to play with Matti and Fil. She put herself on the line for Nashville last August and in exchange they’re supposed to do the same for her now, but unspoken promises don’t feel as real right now - not when the loss itself doesn’t feel real, not when the air is so thick and hot that the tears falling out of her eyes feel more like sweat, not since she finally figured out why Mattias moved away.

What if it’s her? The way these playoffs went, she isn’t really willing to believe that Matti is going to go anywhere - he shut down _everyone_ they had him on - but nothing’s really breaking the surface now enough to be reassuring. Twenty minutes ago, she was so sure they were going to bring it back to Pittsburgh.

PK takes over after Fish finishes, unprompted and unreserved, somehow managing to find a warmth in what they’ve done that cuts through a little of the numbness. Joey hugs Pekka and the few guys who can manage the presence of mind to react begin walking around the room to hug each other. She’s never thought so clearly in her life that she loves this room, that they’re all her family.

But Calla’s still a little too frozen to move. Beside her, Fil looks across to the row of defenseman and says to Mattias, “Come back with us” and he does. He drives his stupid Audi that she used to live in, that she hasn’t been in all year, back to their condo behind Fil and Calla and lays on the couch between her and Fil just like old times.

They turn the television on to something mindless, just like old times, and talk about nothing until the hours have wandered by, just like old times. It’s comforting in a way that even going back to her parents’ place during the summer breaks isn’t.

Calla’s barely awake and if the sound of his light snoring is anything to go by, Fil’s passed out on the other end of the wrap around couch. She rolls over to see if Mattias is awake and he startles at the noise. He’s back to the stunned look he had right after the game, but he pulls it back when she blinks up at him.

“I don’t want that to be the last game we play together,” she blurts, avoiding his eyes as soon as they meet, and looking down at Fil’s sleeping face.

“It won’t be,” he says, sounding so sure. How can he sound so sure?

“Says the guy who moved out so we wouldn’t be so codependent.”

“We know more now than we did when I did that.”

“Not really. Just because they won’t leave you for Vegas doesn’t mean they won’t trade you. You’re one of _‘four Erik Karlssons;’_ that’s sellable. Or they could still leave me off the list.”

“You said they told you they wouldn’t.”

“I know what I _said_ , but people go back on their deals all the time.”

“Hey, Calla, stop.” He edges off the couch so that he’s sort of squatting in front of her and reaches out to her arm. “It won’t be our last game together. I promise. They’d be stupid to get rid of a contract like yours. And even if they do, even if we’re never on the same NHL team again, we’ll just both go back and play our last years with Brynäs, okay?”

There’s something in his eyes and soft smile, reassuring as always, that it doesn’t seem as hard or scary as it has every year before this. Before she can second guess herself, Calla pushes herself up on her arm and uses the other to grab Mattias’ face and pull it toward her.

The faraway fantasy of having a home with him isn’t new, even if it only started when she was in Nashville, but _this_ \- wanting to press her lips to his, to tangle their bodies together so close that all of their air is shared, the distraction of his eyes when he’s smiling - that’s been around so long she doesn’t really remember not knowing it.

She must not surprise him too much, because he kisses back almost as immediately as she begins and she knows she’s done for. It’s familiar and exciting all at once, that brand of comforting she associates with him alone. It’s all of her yearning and all of her hunger, some of it for him and the rest probably misplaced, but on fire just the same.

Mostly it’s just _good_ , a warmth spreading through her core, that burns more when he pushes off the floor a little to cover her on the couch.

“What the fuck, you guys?”

They both jump at the noise, but Mattias pulls back and scrambles to stand up.

Fil’s rubbing his eyes, sitting up on the couch looking at them incredulously.

“Oh my god,” she starts, not even sure how you’re supposed to phrase an apology of this nature. “I’m…”

Fil gets up to start heading for the door and they both follow. He turns around to look at them, but doesn’t really meet Calla’s eyes - probably doesn’t meet Matti’s either. “Like congratulations and I will be really happy for you guys tomorrow but, yea, next time just fucking ask me to leave.”

For a moment, they all stare blankly at each other until, after a few heavy seconds, Fil turns around and leaves.

The door closes and it’s quiet for a second before a commercial blares loudly from the TV that’s still on.

Calla looks at Mattias and he’s looking back at her, flushed and wide eyed.

It’s even easier this time to step toward him and lean up as close as she can get, but their lips have barely touched when he puts his hands on her shoulders and pulls his face away.

“Calla,” he says, eyebrows creasing, but one arm still loosely holding her. “I can’t - if this is just because we lost - this has to be real.”

She’s at a loss for words again, can’t look away from his eyes. Quietly, she says, “It’s real for me.”

He slides his hand along her neck, rests it along her jaw and smiles, eyes wide. “Yea?”

“Matti,” she whines. How could he possibly not know?

He laughs softly, so maybe she should be a bit embarrassed, but she’s never been anything but herself with him before and this doesn’t seem like the time to start.

She’s not even sure she could, when his eyes are looking at her as fondly as they are now and she feels like a current is running through her.

His thumb strokes gently across her cheek before he uses the same hand to pull her back in. The nervous energy disappears and she grabs at his shirt to get closer. This kiss has a little more time to get urgent, his tongue tracing across her lips until she lets it find its way into her mouth. His hand spreads across her back and she thinks absently about how long his fingers are, how they stretch all the way across her. He turns the kiss into nipping at her lower lip and pulls back a little.

“Can I -” he says, eyes darting to the hallway that leads to her bedroom. “Do you want-”

“ _Yes_ ,” she says quickly, cutting him off before he tries to stumble over the rest.

Calla presses a firm kiss to his lips and reaches up to grab the hand he still has on her cheek.

“Come on,” she says, clasped hands hanging between them as she rushes them into her room.

Before she can pull them both onto the bed, he pulls her back, kisses her again standing a foot away from where she really wants them to be.

This time he leaves his hands at her waist, thumbs rustling at her side a little until he can get his hands under her shirt and onto bare skin. She’d changed into a t-shirt and sweats when they got back from the game, but he’s still in the polo and pants from his gameday suit - jacket abandoned on a kitchen chair earlier.

As soon as his hands are on his skin, Calla desperately wants the same. She fumbles at the button of his pants and pulls his shirt from where it was tucked in, sliding her hands onto his stomach, up to his ribs. It’s immediately not enough, so she tugs up on it until he ducks down to let her pull it over his head.

She pulls her own shirt over her head and they’re back together before both grabbing at each other’s pants and abandoning them to the floor.

And, it’s just, she’s thinking back to the brief experience she had of being pinned under Matti on the couch earlier before Fil interrupted, and she really can’t wait any longer, so she pulls him with her as she backs up onto her bed.

He snorts a little as they scoot to a better spot on the bed. “Calla, slow down.”

But he shifts a leg between hers and goes back to kissing her desperately, so he’s not doing much to slow down himself.

It’s all consuming again, the fire at her core and the weight of him on top of her. She presses her hips up into his, and he moans quietly between their lips.

He leans back, and drags his hands down her sides, thumbs pulling a little at her underwear as they go over her hips. He leaves them there for a moment. He locks eyes with her, thumbs at the edges again, and she’s nodding before he even has to ask.

He pulls her underwear down and settles between her legs quickly, and that hits her abruptly in the gut too. The way he’s looking at her, breathing as desperately as she is, would probably be getting to her enough as it is, but she thinks very clearly that maybe he’s been waiting for this just as long as she has and lets herself lose focus.

He’s pressing kisses into her shaking inner thighs, sucking a little as he goes, hands trailing toward her ass, when she lets out a heavy breath.

“Calla,” he sits back a little, rubs a hand along her thigh, maybe trying to steady her. “Are you - is this okay?”

“I’m good - just-”

He presses another soft kiss to her thigh, sits waiting.

“I’m just-” She can’t think of a way to articulate that it’s been _years_ of this hunger. That she’s going to burst out of her skin before he finally touches her. That she’s thought about this for so long but always intangibly and it’s hard to figure out where each second of this measures in comparison. Finally she lands on, “ _Impatient._ ”

He’s laughing again when he says, “Yea, I know.”

She’s a little worried it’s ruined the mood, but he runs his hands back around her ass and nips at her thigh, much higher than he was before. Yea, she’s definitely still good.

She drops her head back against the bed when he slowly licks into her, scrapes her nails against the comforter when he teases at her clit. He shuffles a little before getting into a steady pattern with his tongue that’s honestly doing enough for her as it is, but she feels him slide a finger into her alongside it and her whole body tenses.

Calla arches into his mouth and his finger slips in deeper as he uses the other hand to grip her hips. She already feels so good, aching around him, can feel how wet she must be with how easy he adds a second finger.

She should probably be trying to keep her cool a little more than she is, school her reaction or keep a little quieter, and maybe if she was in any other situation or with anyone else, she could. She tries to clear her head enough to look down at him but he’s clearly so focused and into what he’s doing that her head falls right back against the bed with another moan.

It’s heady, thinking that it’s Mattias between her legs. She’s not really capable of focusing on both how he’s making her feel right now and the fact that it’s _him_ and all of the hopes and dreams she’s pinned to him over the years. Even when this felt so close, it never felt like it would actually happen and now, now she’s breathing heavily to the rhythm of his hand.

“Matti,” she groans, “oh my god.”

He’s got three fingers in her now, moving them hard and fast. She can feel it building within her and it’s a lot. Just when she thinks it might be verging on too much, he laps roughly at her clit as the friction of his fingers hits her just right. She comes hard and tenses her legs around him.

He keeps going, easing and slowing his fingers, and mouth moving back to kissing her inner thigh while she comes down a little.

Eventually she feels for his shoulder without looking up from the ceiling, and breathes out “come _here_ ” because she can’t make her hands work well enough to pull him up.

He’s smiling sweetly when he does and she lifts her head up to kiss him, tastes herself on his lips. She pulls him back down over her, can feel he’s hard when he presses his hips against her thigh. And, she’s not really surprised that he’s as into eating her out as it feels like he is, but it is sort of gratifying anyway.

She’s still wound up, is only getting more so as he starts kissing down her neck, so she lifts her hips back up into his and says, “Matti, fuck me.”

She can’t really reach to pull off his boxers with how they’re positioned, but he gets what she’s going for when she reaches toward his hips and he scoots off the bed. She throws a hand out blindly to her bedside table and scoots over to reach for the drawer she knows has condoms.

His boxers are already somewhere discarded on her bedroom floor when she turns back and recenters herself on the bed.

“God, Calla,” he says reverently, climbing back on the bed on his knees, gently tracing her leg as he does. “You’re so gorgeous.”

She sits up and reaches to grab him. She doesn’t need to stroke him long before he’s ready for her to roll the condom on. He moves to kneel between her legs, and he’s gentler easing into her than she really wants. She thinks briefly that it’ll be hard to train that out of him, but the thought that she gets to have this again and again is too much to process when he’s sinking in to her.

He pulls out slowly and pushes in once more tentatively, before she clenches around him, tries to signal him nonverbally that she’s good. He leans back a little, spreading his legs some and lifts her hips to angle her differently.

This time when he pushes back into her she lets out a gasp. She rolls her hips against him and he finally breaks into a real rhythm. The timing, the angle, it’s all just right, and after a few thrusts, a loud moan escapes her mouth.

“Fuck, Matti,” she says between heavy breathes, “fuck.”

One of his hands is gripping her hip hard enough that she wonders if she’ll have a bruise there tomorrow, or if she’d even be able to notice it against playoff bruises. She hikes her leg up so he goes a little deeper on his next thrust, tries to wrap her legs around his waist.

“Calla,” he pants, and as much time as she’s spent thinking about his eyes, to have them look at her like this - piercing and open - is overwhelming.

She wants to kiss him, but he’s sort of too far away and she doesn’t want to lose this angle when she’s getting so close again. If his breathing is anything to go by, and how he keeps speeding his hips up a little faster every thrust, he’s close too.

Calla tenses her legs around him and he comes with a groan. She’s still just on the edge, squirming underneath him, and she whines a little when he pulls out, sits her back down onto the bed and starts to climb off the bed.

But he’s back before she’s thought to do anything about it herself, climbing all the way over her and saying “shh, Calla, I’ve got you” while he reaches his hand back between her legs. It means she can reach his face again, among other good things, and he kisses her slowly and languidly through her second orgasm.

He rolls off of her, but keeps an arm tucked around her and pulls her close as they both pant heavily and start to come down.

He uses the hand he had in her to turn her head to him; she can tell because it’s sticky on her jaw. She’s ready to complain but he’s kissing her again and she’s not sure she’ll ever stop feeling so desperate against his lips. This one’s soft though, a single press to her lips.

“Calla,” he says again, quiet and awed. She should probably make fun of him for being incapable of saying anything but her name, and maybe she will tomorrow, but tonight she gets it.

Maybe she’s missed a lot up until now, but she does still know him better than anyone else. She’s sure she knows what he’s saying, and the fact that he’s not bringing any L word into this probably speaks to how well he knows her.

Still, the thought that he might scare her away right now is a little crazy to her, when all she can think is _Mine_ over and over again. She should probably articulate that to him somehow, through the fog of everything.

She’s no better at words in this state than she usually is though, so she smiles against the bed and says, “Yea.”

The way his mouth curls up at the corners and his eyes beam, she’s pretty sure he gets it too.

&

_Dec 2014_

They interview her first because, unlike Fil, Calla can’t be convinced into silly arguments over whether cereal is soup  in the locker room that keep you standing there half dressed after a shower for twenty minutes.

The team’s been joking about their little pack of three enough that it doesn’t really surprise her when the media team catches wind. They touched on it last time they filmed for _Beneath the Ice_ in November, highlighting Fil’s goal streak and filming them in Ekky’s car a little.

Calla guesses it played really well, because they pull her to the room to film and explain that they’re going to do a little more on the three of them.

She gives her usual media smile, polite but not really convincing, even if she is genuinely happy to say that she likes the community her two boys give her here in the US and harass Fil a little too while she’s at it.

And then they ask her who’s who in their little family and she freezes on the smile for a moment.

She wonders if they expect her to say she’s the mom no matter what, just pick one of the boys to be the dad, but there is just _no way_ she’s going to say her and Matti are the mom and dad - it’s way too much ammo to give anyone who knows her.

That’s okay, if there’s one thing Calla knows how to do, it’s be an asshole to her best friends.

“I wouldn’t say that we’re a family, all three of us,” she says with the coldest straight face she can manage. “Maybe me and Filip are like the family, and we just go with Ekky because he has a car, and that’s why we hang out with him pretty much.”

“So he’s a good driver then?”

He’s fine, honestly, but she’s got a bit going here, so she says instead, “He can’t drive, we should probably take a cab instead of driving with Ekholm.”

“Alright, so you’re all bad drivers,” the interviewer laughs a little before flipping through the notes she has in front of her. Eventually she continues, “They’re gonna go follow you home tonight and you’re gonna make a little family dinner, so let’s do a few questions on that. Who’s the best cook between you guys?”

“Not me,” she blurts, immediately. “And definitely not Filip.”

“So Ekky then. Does he win by default or is he actually pretty good?”

Calla nods a little. “I have to give him that, he’s a great chef. Me and Filip aren’t good in the kitchen, so I have to give him that.”

That earns a smirk on the other side of the camera, which freaks Calla out a little. She’s certain the next question is going to be more on the same, but instead she gets, “How often do you guys do dinners together?”

And even though that’s a loaded question, since any given day Calla’s probably eating a meal in one or both of their company, it’s relieving that it isn’t the probe she expected. She chooses to just count their formal plans to cook together and answers, “Maybe once or twice a week. It depends what our game schedule is like.”

After they’ve finished with her, she panics a little and goes to find Fil while they’re shooting Ekky’s interview. She definitely shows her hand more than she means to when she not so subtly insists he shouldn’t say he’s their kid.

Fil looks a little exasperated at her convoluted argument - laughs at her more than once - but he comes out with a good answer on camera anyway. He admits that they’re both the two kids and Ekky is the parent without really admitting it, calls him their grandpa instead.

They can’t possibly be fooling anyone, but it makes her a little anxious about how she’ll act when the crew starts to follow them around.

“You guys are the worst,” Ekky says from her side, elbowing her after Fil insults his driving again. “I’m leaving you both here.”

“Hey, don’t beat me up for what he’s saying,” she scoffs.

“Oh, like I didn’t hear yours too.”

She looks over at him at the accusation, trying to think if she said anything that could have crossed a line, but he’s smiling in his usual exasperated way. It’s too much for her to stare at long.

“I called you a good cook,” she insists, looking back toward Fil’s interview instead of getting stuck on the way his eyes squint when he’s happy.

“And a terrible driver.”

She shrugs. “You win some, you lose some.”

“Keep it up, I’m gonna leave both of you here,” he repeats for Fil’s benefit, as they turn off the cameras and he starts to walk toward them.

“Yea, yea, you know you love us,” Fil says as he pulls the cords of the mic from his clothes.

“ _Yea, yea_ ,” Calla mocks, rolling her eyes and looking at Matti.

He laughs and repeats “Yea” back at them.

They’re trailed out to Matti’s car by someone with a smaller handheld camera for the ride back to their building, and the rest of the crew drives separately.

It’s stupid, but Calla is nervous the whole car ride. She doesn’t even look to her left at Ekky when he’s talking, just stares forward and bites her lip a little. Ekky and Fil do most of the talking in the car, and that’s not far off from how it usually is, so she hopes it goes unnoticed.

Maybe it does to the cameras, but both of her boys individually nudge her and ask if she’s okay on the way up to her apartment. She rolls her eyes at each of them, tries to pretend that they’re worrying too much, or that it doesn’t flatter her that they even noticed when they were probably both trying to goof off for the cameras.

For the most part, the crew seems to get that she needs to warm up to the camera a bit if they want her to look a little less like a shut-in.

She’s not on camera when they’re filming Matti cut some vegetables and asking some more prompting questions.

“Last year, it was ‘the three young defenseman’ go everywhere together - now it’s ‘the three Swedes.’ What is it about you that gathers a flock, so to speak?”

“Gathers a flock?” she mouths silently at him raising her eyebrow, and he shakes his head a little laughing.

It’s not a bad question though, if she gets past them being funny about asking it. She knows he has inside jokes and still texts with a lot of the Admirals, even the ones she only met when she was down after the trade. And even though they’re only asking about Elly and Seth, who Calla spent _months_ feeling like she was intruding on, it makes her think of more than half of the team. Jos, Colton, Willy - hell, if she really thinks about how she bonded with most of the team, it was by his side, as his old friend.

“His cooking,” Fil offers as a much simpler suggestion, reaching over to steal a piece of pepper off of Ekky’s board.

“No, Elly’s a good cook too; she doesn’t need me. Seth, maybe not,” Mattias laughs. He looks back up at Calla and adds with a smirk, “But at least Jonesy would buy us takeout sometimes.”

Calla knows this too, has been around enough when the other two defensemen came over and cooked to know to sneak extra portions of something Elly and Ekky made but avoid anything Seth’s touched. It works for Calla; Seth’s good couch company while everyone else is cooking.

“This is from someone who never picks up the check.” Fil’s laughing at them both while he pulls out a pot from beneath Calla’s counter, always happy to start the ‘which one of them’s cheaper?’ debate back up.

“I’m cooking for you guys _right now_ ,” Ekky says, even though Fil is technically helping.

Calla laughs and jumps in, and one of the cameras turns to finally get her in shot. “Yea with groceries I bought.”

“After they spent 10 minutes arguing in the food store over who should pay,” Fil explains to the camera.

Maybe the crew can sense that they’re about to get a replay of that very argument because they’re prompted again, “So do you always cook here at Calla’s place?”

“A lot of the time, yea,” Fil says, turning around to fill a pot with water.

“My apartment’s in the middle,” she explains.

“And if we don’t leave leftovers in her fridge, she’ll starve to death,” Ekky explains, looking stupidly proud.

She almost flips him off before she catches one of the cameras in the corner of her eye.

By the time they’re actually sitting down to eat, she’s forgotten that she was nervous about the cameras and what they’d be able to see and whether she’d be able to act normal for them. She’s sitting at the dinner table, laughing with a mouth full of food at Fil’s dumb impression of Fish and it doesn’t matter that they’re being filmed, it feels like nothing could possibly be more natural.

&

_June 2017_

In the end, she gets her answer before the draft. Nashville doesn’t make any big trades, they keep their promise and on the Saturday before the draft: it’s official. She, Mattias and Fil are all protected, and it’s not forever, but it’s enough.

No one’s left town yet, and there’s an unspoken plan across the team to say goodbye to Nealer before they do. It’s not certain yet that a deal won’t get made - Poile’s done crazier things - but he’s unprotected and it’s close enough that everyone seems pretty sure.

She gets breakfast with him without Fil or Matti. It feels personal in a way she knows they don’t get, even though every spot taken was one Neal could’ve had. There’s no question to Calla; her spot is the one he needed.

They’re not hugging friends usually, but she does anyway when he shows up at the table she’s already waiting at. It’s a goodbye after all.

“It’ll be weird without you,” Calla says after their waitress walks away, “without Shea and Fish…”

“You guys’ll be the veterans?” he jokes. It’s not really accurate, Pekka is almost a decade older than her, and she doesn’t really _know_ that Fish isn’t coming back or where Fidds will end up. Even Nealer isn’t that much older than her, but it rings true a little anyway.

She wishes her food was here already so she could use it as a distraction. Instead she wraps her hands around the coffee she’d ordered before he got there and looks down at it to avoid meeting his eyes.

Calla takes a deep sigh and spits out, “I’m sorry they protected me instead of you.”

Neal laughs. “I thought you were gonna take longer to work up to that.”

It’s not an ‘I forgive you,’ so she keeps going, “I know it’s my fault that you’re going.”

“Calla,” he says, leaning down a little to try to get her to look up at him, and she does. “It’s not _your fault_ . You didn’t actually _pick_.”

“If not for me,” she starts, “for my new contract...”

“Yea, I mean, your contract made it pretty easy, but I would’ve been a problem no matter how you signed.”

That’s not really what she was expecting; that version included a lot more whining.

She’s not really sure what to say to it either, and is saved by the waitress coming with Nealer’s coffee and to take their order. But the silence is a little more awkward when she leaves and he grabs at the box of sugar packets silently.

For a minute, Calla watches Neal assemble his coffee slowly, fumbling a little with his wrapped right hand, and tries to think of something to say. It’s just, she’s not really any better at expressing her feelings in adult ways than he is, and she hadn’t really prepared much more beyond the initial ‘I’m sorry.’

“Calla, I would really love to blame you,” he finally offers, picking up his coffee with his left hand. “But no matter what they still have to sign Joey and Arvi this summer, and then mine’s up next year. If I wasn’t out now, it’d just be a year later. Better now when I can go hang out with Flower and start up a new team.”

It’s a show of emotional maturity that is not very typical of him and vastly more optimistic than anyone would ever give him credit for. She wonders briefly at who got to him first and talked him down a little.

Sure, it’s only one year later, but that’s a year that could end up in a Cup versus a year on a team that might be doing nothing but losing.

This close to the loss though, it feels like a jinx to say as much. Instead she tries, “It’s just a year, but who can say how good that year is.”

“Yea, and I could get traded at the deadline anyway, so it wouldn’t _matter_ how good that year is.” He shrugs and takes a sip of his coffee.

It’s at least back to his trademark pessimism, if nothing else.

“I know the only chance I’ve got on this team of finding someone who thinks I’m smart is Tony, but if there’s one thing I do know about, it’s getting moved,” he says with a bigger smile than Calla thinks this conversation warrants. “And I know you were really scared about it, but it’s not as hard as I made it look.”

“Well yea, you’re a disaster.”

“Big words from a girl who’s spent the last 5 years of her life getting driven everywhere.”

“Hey, don’t say that like it was nothing,” she says, furrowing her brow in mock offense. “That took a lot of effort.”

“I don’t want to hear about what you and Ekky do in the bedroom,” he jokes, raising his hands a little off the table.

She rolls her eyes. She can’t really blame Fil for immediately shaming Matti and her on the group chat, but that doesn’t mean she enjoyed waking up to 175 new messages and the guys taking any and every opportunity to give them shit since then.

At least it hasn’t really been in person much before now.

He wiggles his eyebrows and Calla knows she’s in trouble. “ _See_ , I think we can both agree it would’ve been a shame if Vegas got in the way of young love.”

“Ugh,” she mutters, hoping he gets exactly how much she wants to talk about _young love_. It’s too sentimental for her to be willing to admit out loud to him and it definitely hits a little too close to the anxiety she’s been living with all year, even if she’s sitting here right now because she knows they’re both staying.

She feels guilty, not just that she got the protection, but that she gets to keep her family and home and Nealer’s going to get moved _again_. She gets to be part of this crazy thing they’ve built here. She gets to be safe and happy and, yea, in love, and he gets to start over in the middle of nowhere.

Finally, she asks, “It’s just, how do you rebuild it all over again?”

“Rebuild what?”

“Your home.”

“You don’t,” he says carefully. “The truth is, every time you move you don’t lose your home, it just gets a little more spread out.”

For a man who can’t possibly get to impart wisdom very often, it’s well put.

She thinks about training with the girls in Gävle, daring and pushing each other harder every day; biking in Santa Monica with Filip and Matti, flipping a coin to decide who rides solo and who shares the tandem bike; slapping Jos on his ass in warm ups surrounded by the noise of the home crowd; her and Elly’s plans to check each other on Olympic ice someday, even if it’s Beijing instead of Pyeongchang; of all the places and moments that feel like home.

They’re both quiet while she lets it sink in, and eventually their waitress interrupts the silence with their food. She sits down their plates and asks if they need anything else, but they both smile - Calla’s small and less convincing than Nealer’s, she’s sure - and wave her away.

“Alright, you’re going to stop trying to apologize so we can enjoy our breakfast,” he announces, gesturing at their plates with his broken hand. “It’s fine, _I’m fine_.”

It’s hard to concede that point when he’s waving with a bandaged hand and sitting at a goodbye breakfast, but he doesn’t seem like he’s going to wallow at her like she walked in expecting.

Something must show on her face, because after a moment, he adds, “You deserved it, Calla.”

“Protection?”

“Yea, that,” he shrugs. “All of it. I’m glad you and Ekky figured it out.”

And, yea, she’s glad for all of it too.

**Author's Note:**

> [playlist](https://playmoss.com/en/veksholm/playlist/i-think-you-d-be-warmer-closer-to-me) because i'm self indulgent
> 
> [tumblr](http://veksholm.tumblr.com)


End file.
